Robert Kramer, Norman Fruchter,
John Douglas US l969 - 40 minutes, 16 mm, B/W English - In the
summer of l969, Newsreel went to North Vietnam. This film moves
beyond the perception of the North Vietnamese as victims to a
portrait of how the North Vietnamese society is organized. It
shows the relationship of the people to their government-how local
tasks of a village are coordinated and its needs met. It deals
with the reality of a nation that has been at war for 25 years,
that is not only resisting US aggression and keeping alive under
bombing, but that is also struggling to raise its standard of
living and to overcome the underdevelopment of centuries of colonial
rule. Amid much publicity, the footage was confiscated upon its
return to the US. . Despite this attempt at suppression, PEOPLES'
WAR has become one of the most sought-after films on Vietnam.
Blue ribbon at U.S.A. film festival in Houston, Texas. and the
Golden Bear Award, Moscow, USSR.

Starting Place(1993,

Robert Kramer- France ,83 min.
35mm, color English/French/Vietnamese English Subtitles - In Starting
Place, Robert Kramer revisits Hanoi, two decades after the end
of the war and his making of People’s war. He succeeds in creating
an impressionistic portrait of a country dealing with it’s haunting
past while struggling to build a competitive economy. The film
becomes a powerful testimony about the ones who struggled for
a right cause and who nowadays remain with the 'leftovers' of
their struggle, as well as it’s absence. Kramer films the workers,
their movement and their effort, he encounters his former guide,
as well as a tight-rope walker in the national circus, a former
ballerina, and also his friend Linda Evans, activist, who’s been
sentenced to 40 years since 1985. Linda was part of the trip in
1969 when People’s war was made ; she was fighting daily against
racism and terrorism and she was charged because she bought a
weapon under a false name and helped a friend to escape. "You
can think of my film as a mourning for the ideas for which Linda
is in prison. My ideas are in prison." (Robert Kramer, Paris,
June 1993)

Saykomsa(1998,
20 min)FIRST
NY SCREENING

Robert Kramer France 1998 French
- This shorter piece is a free digression by Robert Kramer and
his wife, Erika, as they look back upon the last ten years of
their life together, and which leads them to question each other
with the desire to always move forward as much as they can.

30
min. discussion

10:00 pm

In The Country(1966,
70 min. )Berlin (1990,
60 min)FIRST
NY SCREENING

Robert Kramer France/US - In 1990,
Robert Kramer receives a grant from the Ford Foundation. He goes
to Berlin for 6 months, where he makes an hour single video shot
in the bathroom of his appartment. Facing the camera, the filmmaker
thinks, alone, about the fall of the Berlin wall. "I’ve already
spent 6 weeks here. With all the events in eastern Europe, it
was like a hurricane. Berlin is a city were you feel the biggest
changes, where you meet Polish imigrants, or others, escaping.
Berlin will become a very violent city. What happens in eastern
Europe is a bit like the end of the civil war in the US. The North,
and all it’s power stimulated by years of war, took over the South,
who has lost everything. And there is this german past, the war,
on all levels. I was really not prepared. I always thought I had
received an european education. In Berlin I discovered I had been
raised in a very german way. Although my mother’s family is originaly
from Russia and my father’s family from Poland, they raised me
like a german middle class kid. When I visited the Berlin Philarmonic,
I was transported back to my childhood at the New York Philarmonic.
This brought me to rethink about my own past." (Robert Kramer
to Liberation - 01/16/91)

FRIDAY, MARCH 37:00pm

Ghosts of Electricity(1997,
20 min)FIRST
NY SCREENING

Robert Kramer France 1997 - One of
Robert Kramer’s latest work, Ghost of Electricity appears as a
reflexion on technology and thoughts, where Kramer imagines a
world in which both cinema and the sciences share a humanist interest
in the bettering of our lives. It is also a declaration of love
to his wife Erika and daughter Keja.

Doc’s Kingdom(1987,
90 min)

Robert Kramer France/Portugal 1987, 1h30, 35mm,
color English/Portuguese With Paul Mc Isaac, Vincent Gallo, Joao
Cesar Monteiro - Doc’s Kingdom is the first film to introduce
the character of DOC, played by Paul Mc Isaac, old friend and
alter ego of Robert Kramer. Doc is an american doctor who lives
in the suburbs of Lisbon, behind the city, where th Tage enters
into the sea. Doc hasn’t been back home and hasn’t seen his wife
Rozie nor ever met their son, and hasn’t seen his friends in over
15 years. In those days Doc was fighting against the Vietnam war;
then he travelled to Africa as a doctor. From this collective
adventure, he finally ends up alone in Portugal where he now lives
a painful existence, between his warehouse, his long and lonely
walks and the hospital where facing other’s suffering allows him
to escape his own. Loneliness and alcohol have taken over. Slowly,
the past is catching up with him : his son Jimmy finds him, and
as they are almost ready to kill each other in a fight, Doc will
finally understands that Jimmy is his son. They will talk, and
the son will slowly understand why the father left abruptly to
pursue his ideals and utopias. With Doc’s Kingdom, Kramer exposes
with subtlety all the themes that are dear to him : alienation
and return, his activist and filmmaker life in the US, the father-son
relationship, and he succeeds in mixing the present with the past
again, where generations confront each other and learn from one
another. When the son returns home, Doc can start to think about
going back to the US as well, where he will meet Kramer in another
film, along Route One.

30
min. discussion

9:00 pm

Walk The Walk(1996,
105 min.)FIRST
NY SCREENING

Robert Kramer France 1996, 1h46,
35mm, color French with English subtitles With Laure Duthilleul,
Jacques martial, Betsabee Haas - Walk the Walk is maybe one of
Kramer’s only true european films, as it attemps to portray the
life of 3 members of an interracial family that lives in the south
of France. When the daughter decides to go into the world to make
her own experiences and travels across Europe. the organic balance
within the family shifts. The father, a sport teacher, will leave
as well and embark on a boat, while the mother, a biologist, experiences
absence and desire for another man. These three parallel stories
allow Kramer to further experiment with his style and play with
fragmention. He juxtaposes documentary and fictional elements
as a cross between his own diary notes, a travelogue, and family
drama, and creates a deep sense of the relationship between place
and emotion. This work could be seen as a letter from a father
to his daughter where he exposes his fears and worries, as well
as his trust and admiration. It is also the tale, once again,
of one generation confronted to the next generation and how they
question each other. The film is dedicated to his daughter Keja,
who once told him : "If you talk the talk, you better walk that
walk".

Robert Kramer, John Douglas US 1975,
3 hours and 15 minutes, 16mm, B/W and color English - This epic
film represents an essential landmark within the political, intellectual
and artistic entreprise of the 60's and 70's, following the Vietnam
War. Milestones cuts back and forth between different story lines
and features over fifty different characters, from Vietnam veterans
to ex-convicts, parents and kids, native americans.... In 3 hours
and 15 minutes, Kramer and Douglas expose the 'tribe' where all
the alternatives of this generation are experimented. The film
questions those experimentations's success and failures, as well
as the directing methods of Newsreel cinema. In 1976, Serge Toubiana
wrote in Les Cahiers du Cinema: "If in Milestones one deals with
new relationships between human beings and with a new way of life
which also integrates the vegetal world as well as the biological
world, one also deals primarly with cinema, with a new form of
cinema, as if Hollywood would not exist. Kramer doesn't make Milestones
against Hollywood, he shoots as if Hollywood doesn't exist."

30
min. discussion

SUNDAY, MARCH 5 2pm

Route One - USA(240
min., 1989)

Robert Kramer 1989, 4 hours, 35mm,
color French with English subtitles ROUTE/ONE USA is the story
of a journey, of a friendship, and of a distant as well as present
past. It's Robert Kramer's second epic where both documentary
and fiction coexist in one single style. The film features Paul
Mc Isaac, long time friend and alter ego. Together they travel
along the East Coast of the US , all the way from the Canadian
border to Key West. Robert Kramer moves through the terrain of
his country of origin, but also it's history, as well as his own
past and his own imaginings. Through this extrordinary piece,
he attempts a film portrait of "a people, but not the masses",
focusing on particular people in particular circumstances to get
beyond generalizations about "the American public". ROUTE/ONE
USA is a movie which enables the film language to open itself
: along this happy as well as worried journey, and through the
various encounters, Kramer composes a cinematic landscape in order
to understand the world were he and we move, and in order to act
as well. Kramer is reinventing the world, and the light in the
world, the music, the sounds. His eye is constantly aware and
at the same time surprised by what it discovers every day. With
this film, Kramer finds a style which will lead to his following
work, and multiply the free and creative approaches of reality
and history.

Films from The Newsreel Years(These films are credited
“by the Newsreel Collective” not Robert Kramer)Columbia(1968,
50 min.)America (1969,
30 min.)

9:00pm

ICE(1969,
135 min.)

Robert Kramer US 1969, 2h05, 16mm,
b/w - This pioneering work is the first film by Kramer which blurs
the boundaries between fictional and documentary style and which
Kramer will pursue in the rest of his film work. An underground
revolutionary group struggles against internal strife which threatens
it’s security and stages guerilla attacks against a fictionalized
facist regime in the US. Throughout the narrative, Kramer intercuts
rethorical sequences that explain the philosophy of radical action
and serve to restrain the melodrama inherent in the thriller genre.
Jonas Mekas said that 'Ice' was "the most original and most significant
American narrative film of the late sixties. (From Harvard film
archive bulletin)

Robert Kramer—who, according to Vincent Canby of the New York Times,
"seems incapable of shooting a scene, framing a shot or catching a line
of dialogue that isn’t loaded with levels of information one usually
finds only in the best, most spare poetry"—died unexpectedly in France
this past November at the age of sixty.

He left a singular body of work—as far from Hollywood as it was from
underground or experimental films—that eventually, he felt, would "make
up one long film . . . one ‘story’ in a continual process of becoming."
A committed leftist who emerged radicalized from his studies in philosophy
and Western European history at Swarthmore and Stanford, he worked as
a reporter in Latin America and organized a community project in a black
neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, before founding the Newsreel movement,
an underground media collective which made some sixty documentaries
and short films about radical political subjects and the antiwar movement
between 1967 and 1971. Kramer made his mark in the 1960s as the great
filmmaker of the American radical left with films like The Edge and
Ice.

Embraced by the European intelligentsia, he eventually moved to Paris
in the early 1980s, where he continued to produce fictionalized and
documentary films on a range of subjects from Portugal’s April Revolution
and post-independence Angola to the Tour de France—all the while maintaining
his "uninterrupted dialogue with America." Our series offers the opportunity
to sample a range of Kramer’s rarely screened work and to pay tribute
to this unique cinematic personality.

Robert Kramer (1939–99) was active as a community organizer in Newark,
N.J., before making his first films in the mid-1960s; he soon became one
of America’s leading independent filmmakers, with works that were at once
politically committed and radical in form. In 1980 he moved to Paris,
where he continued to make films. In memory of the late filmmaker, the
Department of Film and Video presents a program of seven films from MoMA’s
Circulating Film and Video Library.

In 1989, Kramer commented on his oeuvre for the Library’s catalogue: “Eventually,
all these movies I make will make up one long film. One ‘story’ in a continuous
process of becoming: the detailed account of a consciousness moving through
time and place, trying to survive, to understand, trying to find an appropriate
home, and throughout it all living with images, with film-form, as the
one continuous practice that unified this project. The Museum of Modern
Art has Chapter One: ’The New World.’ I hope some day you will acquire
Chapter Two (eight movies made abroad between 1980 and 1987): let’s just
call it ‘Running’ for now. And Chapter Three? I suppose by the year 2000,
if all goes well, this new chapter will have its various meanings.”

Robert Kramer: The New World, 1965–77 was organized by Laurence Kardish.